According to research, fact-checking President Trump backfires, write Sara Kreps, the John L. Wetherill Professor of government, and Douglas Kriner, the Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions, in an op-ed in the Washington Post (with Dino Christenson of Boston University).
“For months, Twitter has been identifying and contextualizing Trump’s misleading tweets, aiming to stop misinformation from spreading on its platform,” they write in the piece. “Such warnings may have been a public relations victory for Twitter and for the other social media companies that took similar steps in 2020, at least among some audiences. But did these efforts affect public opinion about the issue itself?”
